The Third-Party Problem in 2024 and a Longer-Range Solution

We're stuck in a badly designed game that makes minor parties dangerous and irrelevant, except for their ability to spoil a two-party race like Trump v Harris.

If you are at all shocked by Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s decision to attack legal Haitian immigrants for supposedly eating people’s pets, then you haven’t been paying attention. A year ago, just to put all this in some context, Republicans from Trump on down were claiming the president had the constitutional right to do whatever he wanted, promising to slit the throats of civil servants and “destroy” the FBI, and whitewashing the January 6 insurrection as “legitimate political discourse.” What they’re saying now isn’t new; it is just getting more media attention because the election is almost here. So, while it may make you queasy to see and hear this garbage, keep this in mind too: it's all they have. And it isn’t moving Trump-Vance’s poll numbers. They are stuck and flailing. What they are doing is ugly and destructive. But the best way to counter them is to make sure they lose the election.

A year ago, as I wrote here, my biggest worry about 2024 was how third-party and independent candidates might scramble the results in swing states. The conditions back then were different in one critical way: a Trump-Biden rematch was seen by many voters as deeply alienating, with one-quarter of Americans saying they didn’t feel represented by either party. Two-thirds said they weren’t satisfied with either choice. That gave “outsider” candidates and minor parties real potential.

That is different now, obviously. Many young voters and voters of color who had previously expressed disappointment with Biden are coming back to Kamala Harris, which explains her overall rise in the polls over Trump. But as a new strategy memo from MoveOn and Third Way warns, “All seven key battleground states will have at least one spoiler candidate on the ballot.”

● Green Party candidate Jill Stein will be on the ballot in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; in Georgia, a challenge to her ballot appearance is ongoing.

● Independent Cornel West will be on in Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Tentatively, too, he is on in Georgia but a challenge is ongoing.

● Even though he has dropped out, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be on the ballot in Michigan and Wisconsin, though he is still trying to be removed in Michigan.

Current polls suggest that these third-party options could tip the results to Trump in at least four key states: Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan and Wisconsin, though RFK muddies the waters for Trump in the latter two. And Stein, who is making Gaza her signature issue, could also affect the results in Arizona.

MoveOn Political Action and Third Way strategy memo, Sept. 12, 2024

So one way to prioritize your efforts in the next seven weeks is to zero in on those places. Thousands of voters are in play in those states. (For more info, go here.)

(If you want to expand your thinking to the other side of the fence, RFK’s presence on the ballot in Iowa may siphon enough votes away from Trump to help Harris win. Here’s a list of all the states where he will be on the ballot.)

In my humble opinion, the message to bring to third-party curious voters on the left is simple: Your idealism is admirable. We need you to keep pushing for real change. But until we change our two-party system, either to a proportional representation system or one that (like New York and Connecticut) allows smaller parties to “fuse” by cross-nominating candidates, voting for third-party candidates in close elections won’t advance your cause. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz aren’t perfect, but if elected you’ll be able to keep pushing them. The opposite will be true under Trump-Vance.

This isn’t a message that will convince everyone, and it’s important to recognize that some third-party voters have never voted for a major party candidate. We see these people in every state in every election. For them, voting is a moral act, not a tactical one. Asking them to give up that belief is like insisting a vegan eat meat. The only thing that will change their behavior is a change in the two-party system itself.

Speaking of Which…

My friend Lee Drutman, a political scientist who is based at New America’s Political Reform program, has written the anchor essay in a new special issue of the Boston Review called “We Need More Parties.” In it, he makes the case for reviving fusion voting, the system I’m referring to above, which used to be prevalent across America throughout the 1800s, and which enables smaller parties to maintain their own identities distinct from the major parties without forcing their voters to back “spoilers” and “waste” their votes.

Two things about Lee’s essay really stand out for me. The first is how he tears apart a meta-narrative that, to this day, drives so much of our contemporary understanding of politics. That’s the idea that all voters in America have consistent ideological preferences that they come to independent of political parties, that they can be arrayed on a single line from left to right, and that voters decide who to support by accurately picking the party “closest” to them. This mythical view also comes with the notion that most voters are bunched in “the center” and that--barring a variety of distorting factors like closed primaries, gerrymandering and money in politics—the two parties “naturally” gravitate towards the middle, in the hopes of winning the so-called “median voter.”

Lee explains how this theory has never described real world politics in America, though when it was first promulgated in the 1950s the two major parties appeared, momentarily as it turned out, to both be devoted to moderation in politics. President Eisenhower’s decision to call in the National Guard to desegregate a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas blew up that moment of seeming two-party comity.

Getting the meta-narrative wrong about how America has gotten so polarized then leads to reformers offering the wrong prescriptions to fix what ails us. In that wrong-headed view, Lee writes, politics went bad starting in the 1990s when ultra-partisans like Newt Gingrich successfully pioneered their way into power by embracing slash-and-burn nastiness (with a lot of help from rightwing talk-radio and cable, and then social media). Good, compromise-minded moderates then either left politics or got primaried out by extremists. If that’s your analysis, then the solution would appear to be to take power out of the hands of party ideologues by doing things like opening primaries to all voters and weakening the importance of party labels by shifting to things like the “jungle primary” or top-four systems where ranked-choice voting helps sort choices towards consensus. There’s been a lot of money poured into this approach to reform in recent years, much of it by a handful of millionaires and billionaires, and the result is a lot of people now blindly say they favor ranked-choice voting and open primaries, without really giving the issue much thought. (See Harold Meyerson in The American Prospect on where this may go next.)

Unfortunately, this is all wrong. First, there was no “golden age” of sweetness and joy between the two major parties, as Lee notes. What was different until roughly the late 1980s was that both parties were more diverse. There were liberal Republicans (more in the North) and conservative Democrats (more in the South) and this de-facto four-party system thrived on horse-trading and strange-bedfellow coalitions. This broke down starting in the late 1960s as social issues around race, gender and religion became more salient while older localized party organizing weakened thanks to suburbanization and the rise of television. Then, starting in the 1970s, those weakened local parties were displaced by the rise of “national fundraising juggernauts helmed by a professional political class,” Lee writes, along with a plethora of well-financed single-issue interest groups. And this next point is key:

“Starting in the 1990s, as politics became thoroughly nationalized around social and cultural issues, the country saw significant internal migration: Democrats abandoned rural and exurban areas, and Republicans abandoned urban areas. This geographic sorting in turn led to shrinking partisan competition in many areas—and the disappearance of party organizations along with it. After all, in a system of winner-take-all elections, why invest in places where support is below 40 percent? This geographic sorting atop single-winner districts was the central mechanism that drove the collapse of the de facto four-party system into only two parties.

In short, the two parties grew “hollow,” in the apt phrasing of Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld: they have come to be floating presences disconnected from most citizens, run by pollsters and messaging gurus. As a result, more and more citizens have become frustrated bystanders in national politics, and a growing share of citizens have rejected partisan conflict entirely. In some cases the major parties have responded by trying to fit more issues and groups in their coalitions, but mostly they have taken to demonizing the other side. You might not feel inspired by us, party leaders effectively tell voters, but they are terrible for the issues you care most about—abortion, as the Democrats emphasized, or religious “freedom,” according to the GOP.

The cumulative effect of these changes has been disastrous. Partisan conflict is a blasted terrain, but voters who don’t like it have nowhere to go. An overwhelming messaging machinery tells voters that even if they don’t like their party, the other side winning would be far worse—and that losing, therefore, is unacceptable. It is under these conditions—high partisan division, low system legitimacy, high citizen disaffection—that democracies typically crumble.”

I would add one additional point. For argument’s sake, strip away the real ideological and social differences between today’s Republicans and Democrats—the former really is the home of white Christian-nationalist, rural America and the latter really is the home of multiracial, religious-pluralist cosmopolitan America—and just think of the two-party winner-take-all system as an abstract competition. Both parties and their most ardent supporters are doing what, logically, two teams would do if they were playing a game that kept other teams from being able to compete, and where 100% of the spoils of victory flowed to whomever could get 50%+1 of the vote.

If one side got good at registering more voters that identified with it, the other side would get good at making it harder for people to register and vote (and vice versa). If both sides figure out that campaigning negatively depresses the voters of the other side more, then both will adopt that approach. In such a zero-sum conflict, both sides inextricably find that demonizing the other side as an existential threat (“authoritarianism!” “socialism!”) works very well to motivate its base and justify increasingly harsh behavior towards the other side. We Americans are caught in a mirror world; if you’ve ever talked with someone from the other side you may want to reflect on how much they are just responding rationally to growing up inside a different, tribal reality.

That’s what today’s two-party hammerlock on politics is doing to us. Lee’s solution to what he calls the “two-party doom loop” that we are now stuck in is to favor reforms that give voters more choices while simultaneously recognizing that parties are the essential building blocks of politics. Attempts to reduce partisanship fundamentally misunderstand what motivates voters—most of us identify with parties because they provide people with identities and help them sort out complex voting decisions. Most voters do not have and will not make the time to “do their own research,” nor do they have the skills or ability to defend themselves from being manipulated by big money-driven advertising or deep lobbying when they try to do so.

Similarly, solutions like ranked-choice voting (which briefly inspires more candidates to self-nominate) or "open" primaries (which blocks political parties from choosing their own nominees) -- neither of these and similar anti-party reforms alters the actual dynamics of American politics. Having the backing of organized money and/or organized people are still the most critical factors in determining who runs and who wins. (There are other problems with RCV as well, like its tendency to disproportionately disenfranchise voters of color as well as poorer and less educated voters, all of whom are more likely to either invalidate their ballots by filling them out wrong or only rank a few candidates, leading their ballots to be discarded before they can influence who is the final ranked-choice winner. The hard truth is RCV tilts elections more towards wealthy individual candidates and those who can attract lots of wealthy backers—which again helps explain why so many rich donors are backing it.)

Lee’s solution, which I endorse, is to look for ways to not just make the two parties healthier but to also make it possible for more parties to form and play an ongoing, constructive role in the process. (Countries that have well-designed multi-party systems, like Germany, tend to have less polarized populations—not that they are immune to rightwing populism, but such parties don’t get total power when they get when they capture 20% of the public, unlike here.) That’s why he makes the case for reviving fusion voting.

In the 1800s, minor parties were not spoilers—they were powerbrokers and often elected their standard-bearers to major offices from Congress and Governor on down. That’s because they could cross-nominate candidates of other parties and thus demonstrate their value as independent actors both to voters and candidates. Without fusion voting, the pro-slavery two-party system of the 1840s and 1850s would never have been challenged by the coterie of smaller parties that ultimately became the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln. Without it, we would not have seen successful Populist and other progressive challenges in the 1870s-1890s. The two parties started banning fusion voting starting at the turn of that century precisely because it allowed smaller parties to seriously compete with them.

And why does all of this matter now? Because the doom loop we are stuck in won’t go away after January 21, 2025, when the next duly elected President is sworn in. That day will just be a respite—absolutely one we must focus on reaching now, but insufficient unless you like being stuck in a Groundhog Day political timeline. Reviving fusion would make it much easier for disaffected Republicans to shift their allegiance away from the MAGA cult without having to vote for Democrats on the Democratic Party line; instead, something like a “Common Sense” or “Moderate” Party could easily form and act as the vehicle for their votes. Likewise, on the left, voters frustrated with the Democratic Party’s support for militarism and imperialism could easily form a “Ceasefire” Party and express their dissent forcefully without risking electing more Trumpites.

The work of reviving fusion is still in its early days. As Lee notes, there are lawsuits on behalf of new, moderate parties in New Jersey and Kansas slowly working their way through state courts. Change could come faster if legislatures chose to act, or if some deep-pocketed donors decided to come up with money for expensive, but winnable, ballot initiatives. The usefulness of a fulcrum party to strengthen the pro-democracy side of the electorate is still in the process of being made. But after the dust settles on 2024, I’m hoping more people will take Lee’s whole argument seriously. We can’t keep repeating the same fights ever four years. We deserve a better system.

—Bonus link: The response essays that accompany Lee’s lead piece in the Boston Review are also worth attending to. In particular, Josh Lerner, a leader in the field of participatory budgeting for many years, makes a strong case for expanding the scope of democracy beyond voting in elections; organizers Maurice Mitchell and Doran Schrantz argue for fusion’s value to state-level power-building efforts; legal scholar Tabatha Abu El-Haj explains why the Supreme Court’s Timmons ruling should not deter state-level efforts to revive fusion; and labor leader Bob Master, one of the cofounders of NY’s Working Families Party details how fusion, WFP-style, has shifted power here. There are some strong dissenting arguments to consider as well, most notably from Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman, who are less optimistic than Lee about fusion’s value or chances to advance; and from Deepak Bhargava and Arianna Jimenez, who put more emphasis on reviving locally rooted membership organizations and unions than parties.

One Thing to Use

—Check out Keyboards for Kamala, a labor of love from three experts in online persuasion, my friend Sahar Massachi, Elise Liu and Shug Ghosh. It’s two things in one. First, on the home page you get fresh content from places like TikTok and Instagram that is already gaining traction but can use a boost (and may be useful in your own interactions with people you know). More crucially, the site offers an easy-to-read playbook for anyone who wants to make an actual difference in the election in their online interactions with others.

One Thing to Read

Michael Hirschorn’s guest essay in the New York Times about “How a Naked Man on a Tropical Island Created Our Current Political Insanity” (gift link) isn’t just a great clickbait headline. It’s a very smart exploration of how American culture turned sour, mean, and performative, in part because TV and cable audiences ate that stuff up, and how it may be turning again in a more joyful and authentic direction.

One Thing to Share

It’s National Voter Registration Day and the Broadway company of Hamilton wants to make sure you don’t miss your shot. People who register to vote tend to turn out at higher rates than the general electorate. In 2020, according to data shared with me from Democracy Works, of about 450,000 users who signed up for voter registration help from TurboVote, a little more than 255,000 registered and 185,000 votes. That’s a 78% turnout rate, compared to the national average of 70%. In the mid-terms of 2022, 267,000 TurboVote users successfully registered and 169,000 voted, a 65% turnout rate compared to the national average of 49%. If you know someone in college who needs help registered, go to Swing the Vote!

End Times

Ouch! (h/t Josh Nelson)